Business is increasingly being conducted in an electronic environment over network connections. This has rapidly increased the speed with which business is conducted but has also presented a number of challenges for the infrastructure that supports these business transactions.
For example, an infrastructure has to perform a variety of actions each time a directive is issued by a seller or merchant. If a particular merchant issues a large number of directives or if a plurality of merchants all attempt to issue directives at largely the same time, then latency can be experienced and processing load within the infrastructure can become degraded.
Typically, directives of a merchant or other participant involved in a business transaction are queued and sequentially processed in a synchronized fashion. This processing linearity does not fully take advantage of more modern multiprocessing architectures, which means that latency may be experienced while some resources of the business infrastructure remain idle or underutilized. In a similar manner, the processing associated with the actions is typically not multithreaded, which means that multiple instances of a same action cannot process concurrently within a same environment.
In addition, typical business transaction architectures are tightly coupled, which means that changes to the processing flow or the applications processing within the processing flow necessitate additional changes that have to be propagated throughout the infrastructure. As a result, businesses have been reluctant to address latency and load problems associated with their infrastructure; rather the desired approach has been to add additional hardware resources. But, as stated above, in many cases existing hardware resources are underutilized and adding more hardware resources does little to address the real problem. Moreover, in order to take advantage of more modern architectures, the processing flow of the business infrastructure has to be modified and decoupled. The perceived enormity of this task associated with modifying the processing flow of a business's infrastructure has kept businesses on the sidelines and has not produced any viable solutions to infrastructure problems.